Digital Citizenship Week 2017

Digital Citizenship Week is Oct 16-20th this year.  I started my preparation when I received an email from Common Sense Media with this link to their resources.
I clicked on their Quick Start Activities and looked in 9-12 for ideas. I downloaded a copy of their Digital Dilemmas, which are fictitious scenarios based on real situations with corresponding questions for discussion. This reminded me of another strategy that I recently saw on Cult of Pedagogy: Chat Stations.  You've probably already done something similar, but I love the way she explains this and it made it easy to share with my faculty. I also wanted to have some sort of accountability to keep them on topic so I created a Peer Evaluation using Google Forms, similar to this one shared on Alice Keeler's blog. I created this form asking students to evaluate their partner/group members on listening, quality of participation and frequency of participation. Once I had this put together I shared with the faculty and invited classes in for the lesson and shared if teachers wanted to use the materials in class.
I had the opportunity to do a test run on this part of the lesson a few days ago when a class needed to be covered for a teacher in a meeting.
I printed the Digital Dilemmas and spread them around the library. Students traveled in pairs and had 5 minutes at each station. I retyped the questions onto a handout so that students could turn in their thoughts to the teacher since she wasn't present for the lesson. It went well and their discussions were thoughtful and mature.


Thanks to Frank Baker (@fbaker, Media Literacy extraordinaire) I saw this article, Making Media Literacy Great Again, and loved the idea shared by the professor to show news memes and have students decide if it was BS or not. I couldn't find any suitable for high school and wanted to get non-political stories if at all possible, so I made my own using the Mematic app. Of course, I can't have students yell out BS so I changed it to Poop or Truth. I am going to share an image of the poop emoji and a "truth" emoji and ask students to save in camera roll on their iPads so that they can vote using their iPad screens.

You can get a copy of the Slides here. Make sure to look in notes for links to articles and whether the meme is Poop or Truth.

To wrap up the lesson, each student will log into our school account on Checkology and begin the lessons on Filtering News and Information. You can get your own free account this year by visiting their site: checkology.org. I have 7 classes coming in this week for this lesson. Follow our Twitter feed for pictures. I hope you can use these ideas. Tweet to me @coxtl if you have any questions or issues with links.